LEGO Birkenhead Point Keychains

The Keys to Successful Collecting

Promotional items are amongst the most sought after and valuable pieces in any line of toy collectables. From store displays such as Kenner’s Star Wars to salesman samples and awards such as Mattel’s Hot Wheels we all love having items in our collections that are outside the standard production stuff that was available to everyone.

As you may recall from my last post I’m a bit of a LEGO nut, so imagine my delight to find this promotional keyring in a lot of 80’s LEGO items I bought the other day.

Not only is it a promo item, it’s an Australian exclusive – and you know how I feel about those! I love finding stuff like this, it’s often a challenge to track down info about them. In this case I knew I had the vast resources of the web’s extraordinarily comprehensive LEGO collector’s sites such as Peeron, Lugnet and BrickLink. It was the latter who came to my aid with pics of a few of the little Elephant’s buddies from the long gone Birkenhead Point LEGO Centre in Sydney.

After a bit more digging I discovered that the Sydney LEGO Centre was apparently the only one outside Denmark, and that it closed down in the mid 1990’s. The keyring is probably from 1985, but I don’t know if they were giveaways or could be purchased as souvenirs or the like.
If you grew up in Sydney and remember the centre let me know, I’d love to share some memories of it.

Cheers All!
Will